Human Traffickers are Paying Corrupt Clergy to Lure Pakistani Christian Girls so They Can Sell Them to Chinese Grooms

Human traffickers are paying corrupt clergy to lure impoverished Christian girls from Pakistan to China in order to sell them into marriages with older Chinese men, human rights groups said.

Pastors, Pakistani government officials, and brides who escaped their Chinese husbands said “marriage brokers” began targeting girls from poor Christian families in Pakistan in late 2018 in response to a mounting demand for foreign brides in China, according to The Associated Press.

Traffickers have sold up to 1,000 Pakistani girls into sexual slavery thinly veiled as marriage since October of 2018, aided by what activists claim is the apathy of immigration officials and the greed of corrupt priests. 

“This is human smuggling,” Ijaz Alam Augustine, human rights and minorities minister for the Punjab province of Pakistan, told the AP. “Greed is really responsible for these marriages … I have met with some of these girls and they are very poor.”

Human traffickers have enlisted the help of corrupt clerics who offer poor Christian families thousands of dollars in exchange for allowing their daughters to be sold into marriage to Chinese men who, they are told, are wealthy converts to Christianity. The lure is especially enticing to Pakistani Christian families, as Christians in Pakistan have little political support and are among the poorest people in the country.